It's obvious to point out that Gordon Ramsay is now a brand, but a brand of what? His restaurants worldwide bear his name but any personal style or culinary insight he brought to his dishes has been diluted into an indistinct supra-national product - more refined than a McBurger by an order of magnitude, but no less reliable from Fulham to Dubai.

There's never been anything like brand Ramsay in the world of cooking before, so there is no model for this kind of hybrid success. After a brief PR exercise involving linked webcams in the kitchen of each restaurant, Ramsay realised the opinions of foodies didn't matter. If his profile was high enough, if he spent enough airtime pushing his brand values of fanatical attention to detail and uncompromising standards, his presence in the kitchen made no difference to the number of people flocking to his restaurants. This was probably the point where Ramsay ceased to be a chef and metamorphosed into a post-culinary phenomenon.Although Ramsay is a success on a level with professional sportsmen and old-school rock stars, his position rests on two bases: restaurants, the most notoriously failure-prone of business sectors, and a carefully constructed media persona.

If those two represent the assets of brand Ramsay, then he's suddenly on exceptionally rocky ground. For a long time the fervid world of online chefwatchers has been abuzz with speculation about the persistent absence of filed accounts and, meanwhile, the tabloids seem to have tired of stories of his celebrity antics and photogenic family life and are beginning to circle for much juicier targets in his personal life.

Whichever way you look at it, it suddenly seems to be open season on Gordon Ramsay.